Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Jennifer Barry recently published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Christian Orthodoxy. The article, “We Didn’t Start the Fire: The Alexandrian legacy within orthodox memory,” is free and available to the public.
An abstract of the article includes the following:
If we think about the past and the way Christians constructed the signs and symbols of persecution, invariably something—or, someone—is on fire. In this article, I argue that the destruction of two significant Alexandrian holy sites, the Great Alexandrian Church and the Serapeum, tells us a great deal about how fifth-century ecclesiastical historians crafted episcopal legitimacy by using familiar tropes that signaled to their readers that a Christian persecution was underway. I conclude that how a bishop played with fire made all the difference in the story of Christian orthodoxy.